To the editors:

Re: Arianne R, Cohen’s “Women Don’t Do This” (Opinion, Sept. 20):

Men don’t write this. Men can’t write this.

Men can’t write generalizing opinions on an entire half of the world’s population without being criticized and condemned as bigots, chauvinists and the like.

Men can’t distribute holier-than-thou criticisms about the nature and being of the opposite sex without virulent claims of being from a backwards (and often backwoods) society. Men can’t pin individual shortcomings on semi-universal anatomical and biological traits without having their ethics and intelligence called into question.

It’s disheartening to hear someone as insightful and rational as a Harvard student try to summarize the attacks of last Tuesday into a quaint rationale: Too Much Testosterone. Asserting that raw biology somehow transcends other psychological and societal trends that may cause rage, fanaticism and, ultimately, desperate violence invites almost a directly opposing response: if men are savage brutes, controlled by their hormonal and emotional status and tempered only by women, then women are by nature incapable of anything in the realm of aggressiveness. Isn’t this just as blatantly sexist an assumption as the one Cohen displays?

I also do not understand her issue with actively finding and extensively disciplining whoever is responsible—it seems her only question is over President George W. Bush’s terminology, the less politically-correct verbs “hunt” and “punish.”

Politically correct is the last thing we need to be when challenges are made to our fundamental liberties. Memo to “R”: justice and peace are not necessarily compatible.

Cohen should rethink her disgust with the male half of her own species. Individual responsibility cannot be masked behind a blind attempt to resolve her motives for peace through sexism. We do need compassion and caring solidarity. But instilling a mentality that women are so more morally superior is not constructive in that respect.

And yes, intelligent, effective retaliation against our actual enemy can come later. That’s what has kept me—a male, no less—to writing this letter, and not doing something more violent.

Bradley W. Rodriguez ’03

Sept. 20, 2001