THE LOSS OF A FEMINIST

I don’t do this lightly. I am canceling my subscription to the Los Angeles Times. I have been a Sunday subscriber for years, primarily because of the Book Review section.

On Sunday morning, Feb. 3, after reeling from “the white feminists of today who have their own black spokespeople” (Ishmael Reed’s review of “Frederick Douglass,” Feb. 3), I realized how routine the feminist-hating has become and I thought: I’m paying out my hard-earned money to be assaulted.

The loss of a feminist reader will not be felt, although the production of a newspaper that cannot be read by women who value themselves raises some interesting free-speech issues. The absence of feminist insight from the pages of a “thinking person’s” journal, however, means there is nothing new about the news, that there are no new stories, only endless repetitions of an old one: Man lusts and thinks and dreams and hurts and idolizes and suffers; the world is his stage, and all that is not-man--space and Earth, women and children--are props for his performance.

There is a smell of stale semen about the story. I want no part of it.

DIANE R. HOLMAN, LAGUNA BEACH