Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
letters THE PRICE IS WRONG Something is puzzling me about this gender-pricing-gap campaign [Winter 2011]. If two products, men’s and women’s, are essentially identical except for packaging, why not just buy the men’s product? Or buy uni- sex products—my household likes Tom’s of Maine deodorant. I’ve been buying what’s cheapest and/or suits me best for decades without paying much attention to gender specificity. I’ve even been known to wear men’s jockey shorts—comfortable, durable, absorbent, cheap, what’s not to like? Now that I’m in trifocals, I select men’s frames for my glasses— women’s are too tiny and fragile. —H. Beeler Newport, VA Editors’ note: We like the idea of unisex products, but if products are labeled for men or women, they should be of equal price and hopefully equal quality! To launder a men’s cotton dress shirt in my neighborhood costs $1.35; to launder a women’s cotton dress shirt with no darts, $4.35. I have started a petition in Westchester County, Gender Pricing Gap N.Y., against gender-pricing discrim- ination in New York and have more than 100 signatures. —Alix Nimphius Hawthorne, NY I was looking for thermals at Target. First I checked out the women’s sec- tions. Their thermals were…thin. They ran about $11 to $15 for the bottoms and a little less for the tops. Then I went to the men’s section. The tops were as low as $3.74 and much thicker! I bought the men’s thermal shirt. —Katherine Gotthardt Bristow, VA BEHIND THE “NO COMMENT” Who would believe that the enclosed advertisement [see No Comment, p. 64] for the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas would ever be taken seriously as a gesture of enticement? “I love hard labor; I could watch it all day” is a bad enough message, but to illus- trate this text with an indolent man and a [highly] sexualized woman as if this is all there were to life…well, I am afraid for America and its future. I have subscribed to Ms. off and on, depend- ing on my economic cir- cumstances, since its first issue. We need you. —Sandy Schaefer Ung Orleans, MA $7.99 WOMEN’S per tank $3.33 MEN’S per tank A reader alerted Ms. to the disparity in the sale price of ribbed cotton tanks in Hanes’ latest catalog: Women’s were sold singly for $7.99 each; men’s were offered in a $19.99 six-pack (or $3.33 each). 8 | SPRING 2011 A TAMPON CAMPAIGN? Since Speaker of the House John Bo(eh)ner is so interested in what happens inside of our bodies, especially in our uteri, why don’t we start a campaign to send him our used and discarded feminine hygiene prod- ucts? Imagine…box after box after box of tampons and pads pouring in to the office of the speaker. He has made our bodies his personal domain, and would like to have a say in our most intimate decisions, so let’s go ahead and share with him what he thinks is already his: the con- tents of our uteri. —Devon Moore Via email JANE SAYS MORE Thank you for Jessica Stites’ survey of feminist-inspiring heroes and heroines of young-adult novels [“Kick-Ass Girls & Feminist Boys,” Fall 2010]. Stites made excellent points about the availability and vari- ety of feminist books for teens today. Even “trashy” books feature strong female characters unafraid of their own power and ready to take on the world. I do take issue, though, because while she mentioned Jane Purdy of Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen, the heroine was brushed off as concerned with sweater sets and malt shops. The re- ality is that Cleary wrote realistic feminist fiction for girls within the world in which they lived. The strug- gle of Fifteen was one of identity, not trying to get a boy to like you. While the context was the dating world, how many of us as teens struggled to figure out who we were within this? Jane Purdy taught girls that it was okay to be yourself, even if that self was viewed as boring and outmoded by the popular crowd. —Lizz Zitron Outreach Services Librarian Carthage College Hedberg Library Kenosha, WI OUR SISTERS IN GUATEMALA Last issue, there was an article by Pamela Redela [“Fighting Femicide,” www.feminist.org