WHO’S THIS ‘US’?

Reviewer Karen Stabiner poses an “awkward question” as she doubts the relevance of Betsy Peterson’s “Dancing With Daddy” (Aug. 4) to “the rest of us.” Referring to whom? The women with no history of sexual violation? The men who haven’t committed any?

Excluding the more general forms of sexual betrayal, more than half the women in this country, a conservative estimate, have had to shovel psychological debris for years after either rape or incest. For the rest of “us,” the relevance might lie, for example, in the myth of the American family as a haven of safety and in the country’s long-standing pattern of sexual violence.

Stabiner would be lucky to find so wide a base for any of the three male-authored books she reviewed the same day, all of which deal in some fashion with the betrayal of trust, none of which raise any questions regarding the legitimacy of their pain or their need to write it.

KATE MCFADDEN, ARCADIA