…then I read through the link above (powells.com). Leslie Bennetts really is annoying. But kudos for taking the high road.

URL: http://www.powells.com/blog/?author=113

Perhaps most interesting is that Penelope Trunk was not the only person to say “fat”. Dr. Laura Schlesinger did too apparently.

What more do you want?

I’ll ask each of you the same thing I asked her when she made the post: have YOU ever said or done anything you later looked back on and regretted? Then how can you bash her for doing that? She’s a blogger. She’s human. She’ll make mistakes. Get over it.

Your whole shtick is about quality of life. You feel that not letting one’s corpus go to hell — independently of how others judge that person visually, but rather as a reflection of one’s well-being — is a big part of that. I don’t want to take financial advice from someone with massive credit card debt; you don’t want to take QoL advice from someone who has put other things ahead of their health. And that’s a super-important point .. this whole super-mommy business is leaving a generation with 0-to-1 parent figures, and everyone is pretending that nothing has to give. I think that myth leaves a lot of people unhappy, and should be refuted where possible.

Rave on.

Per the reader comments over on your Yahoo column: interesting that you mentioned them. Because it’s gotten to where they really piss me off: the ad hominem (no pun intended) personal comments/insults that the women authors get over there on the Yahoo site, versus what the the men authors receive. You get the worst of it, from what I’ve seen, but Suze and the other women get a reasonable share of it too.

My scan through the Yahoo comments shows that women authors receive 100% of the “body/appearance” type of comments, and that they also receive the lion’s share of the “belittling the author’s intelligence/credentials” types of comment (”who does this person think they are, what a moron, she’re just a failed flack” type of comments.) I don’t consider myself to be hyper-sensitive to this kind of thing…but the contrast is pretty glaring, if you scan the comments threads. Yeah, occasionally somebody will sneer at Robert K or one of the guys. But the majority of negative, insult-type comments are directed at the women.

I don’t come to YPF to read comments about some woman columnist’s fuckability according to some dork commenter. I come to YPF for rational, professional information and (hopefully) rational, professional comments. And, given that YPS was intentionally designed to attract more women readers…you would think that allowing commenters to figuratively leer and belittle the women authors, would be something that Yahoo might realize isn’t creating an attractive environment for women visitors.

I live in Silicon Valley and happen to know somebody at Yahoo who’s part of the team supporting the Personal Finance site, and I complained to him about the whole thing. I begged this guy to talk to Y! site management and to please not let the comments threads on YPF turn into yet another bottomless pit of venomous sexist crap, like has happened on so many other sites.

(Note that I have no issue with legitimate criticisms of columns & content — but I’m not interested in reading personal attacks against people, male or female, such as comments about a person’s appearance, sexuality, intelligence, “who the hell does s/he think he is”, etc.)

Um, is it me? Or didn’t Penelope apologize for 10 paragraphs about making the infamous post? Until we have the ability to go back in time and erase mistakes completely, apologies will have to do.

I think we have all said things–in person and in e-mails–we’ve regretted. From entry level to CEOs. What separates professionals from non, is the ability to recognize mistakes, take responsibility for them, and see that they don’t happen again.

How can anyone take you seriously as a career advisor if you don’t meet the behaviour standards of a mid-level employee?

However, you’ve really lost any sense of respect that I had for you if you make that kind of a judgement about someone simply because their body shape is repellent to you. It has revealed that you are shallow and that your antipathy toward fat people completely clouds your professional judgement.

Signed,

Anne (a size 6 who doesn’t think less of people who are size 16 or size 26, something I of course seek to clarify before you dismiss my opinion because you presume that I am SO INCREDIBLY FAT!!!)