Navy’s Tailhook Incident

In response to “For Women in the Navy, Rough Waters Run Deep,” June 28:

When women are treated by institutions of the U.S. government as unequal to men and when it is seen as constitutionally legal to bar a group of people (the country’s majority population in the case of women, I might add) from certain rights held by men, why should it come as any surprise that the men at the Tailhook convention thought nothing of humiliating and assaulting those women?

I don’t recall ever having been asked if I felt “at ease” working alongside men. I don’t recall ever having been asked if men were “a distraction that could affect my concentration.” If this is the way men feel about women in certain military positions, too bad. As a woman I am sick and tired of having to prove my worth to men. It’s time to stop accommodating ignorance and bigotry and put men in the position of changing their attitudes and behavior toward women, or get out.

KAREN WEEKS, Los Angeles