E.J., clearly you're right about Clark Rockefeller—as the evidence mounts (and boy does it seem to be mounting), it seems clearer and clearer the guy is a con artist and murderer. So yes, no sympathy there! Whatever empathy I had for him was based on the assumption that he was just a rich, eccentric dad who loved his daughter, not a murderer and ...

Meghan, I guess I just can't let this bone go. I do understand sympathy for fathers who feel shut out of relationships with their children—and actually, for anyone (man or woman) who ends up in family court, waiting for a judge to decide the fate of the family based on who knows what prejudices. It's a horrible and nailbiting experience. But Clark ...

E.J., you ask (quite sanely!) whether I ''seriously'' feel any sympathy for Clark Rockefeller, who, after all, stole his daughter from a social worker in broad daylight, as it were. Alas, the answer is yes, possibly. I don't honestly know. I think the guy deserves his day in court and till more is known about the situation I'll reserve making any ...

Meghan,Dahlia has noted the painful fact that there is simply no good way for divorced families to accommodate two working parents (a product of a changed economy more than of feminism, I would argue, but that's for another day). So let me take issue with blaming feminism for Clark Rockefeller's kidnapping his daughter—or rather, for treating men ...

Meghan, the Clark Rockefeller story really is deeply weird, and getting weirder by the day. Now we hear allegations that he’s tied to some murder in California. Jump back Lifetime. You can’t make this stuff up. You’re also right that there is something disturbing about the lingering preference for mothers in disputed custody cases, and ...

Has anyone been following the amazing story of Clark Rockefeller, the divorced father who kidnapped his daughter last week when she was visiting from England with her mother? There are many incredible elements to the story, including the fact that Rockefeller may not be who he said he was; the FBI has said he doesn't have a Social Security number. ...

Well, what confused me is that Tien does not describe her marriage as a bad marriage, or her predicament as particular. ''Don't misunderstand. I would not, could not disparage my marriage,'' she writes, after spending 500 words describing her husband as a drivelling idiot. And then: ''Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. ...

Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a ...

Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John ...

Ann and Meghan, when I tried to come up with male journalists and essayists who run down their wives last night, Norman Mailer kept popping into my head. Wrong era (and maybe wrong kind of misogyny). The men's companion volume to The Bitch in the House, as I recall, was mild and mewling by comparison. Do women bitch more because they're ...