Ready to Divorce—or Marry—'Voice' Over Sex Column

Letter of the Week
Wayne Barrett's "The Sales of Justice" [January 17-23] was the finest piece of investigative reporting to come out of this paper since you fired all of your other serious writers. As a practicing attorney I appeared before many of the judges mentioned in your article and my colleagues and I have spent many an hour comparing notes about which Kings County Supreme Court judge is the least judicially competent and most mentally disturbed. What is especially galling to me is that many of the judges implicated in this chicanery are still on the bench. The only way to truly clean house is to investigate all of the sitting Kings County judges since they all came out of the same corrupt machine. Hynes should be commended for his efforts to open the windows and air out the stench on Court Street.
Mark Rutkowski
Staten Island

Wedded dis
Re Nora Shelley and Essie Carmichael's "Married, Not Dead" [January 17-23]: When the fuck did this paper become about people with nannies and housekeepers? There's a publication for the sexless, medicated, hyper-consumerist breeders of this town, and it's called New York Magazine. So let's leave them to find the perfect preschool for precious little Stockton and Sequoia and make snarky remarks to each other about who's the better practitioner of attachment parenting, and avoid turning the Voice into some kind of alternative weekly for the post-yuppie larvae swarming the city. I'm all for people fucking their spouses—I'm even up for people fucking other people's spouses—but the whole Cult of Domesticity thing that seems to be characterizing certain segments of the population is creepy and irritating.
H. Fons

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I sent your article to every married woman I know, including my own wife (while sitting at my computer in my home office). We even have three kids, and my initials are J.P. Thanks for a great and poignant article.
John Peters
Rochester Hills, Michigan

Is there an editor actually working here in New York? What is this crap by the boring new sex columnists? You have fired the most interesting writers and outsourced writing to red states, and now bore us with this drivel from rich white women who have nannies, babysitters, and housekeepers and still can't have sex for three months. We live in New York, not some Hicksville schighthole in Bush's America.
Goo Ber

You've got to be kidding. What can these women possibly have to say about sex that is remotely relevant to people who actually have sex or have sex-related issues they need help with (let alone the twentysomethings whom your advertising reflects is the bulk of your demographic)? I remember when I used to actually pay to read the Voice, but the way you are jettisoning exceptional columnists, you're going to have to start paying me to read it.
Michael Schreiber

This article was not only hysterical, but a true testament of what's wrong with most married couples. People have to give up this notion that marriage and sex don't go together. I'm far from a hopeless romantic, but if you can't have sex with your husband, then who? Showerhead or Rabbit vibrator, women should always put on sexy underwear and sip some coffee before their husbands come home from work, then pounce. If women don't initiate sex, men will forget it's an option.
Natalia Chavez
Jackson Heights, New York

Since when did the Voicebecome an urban version of McCall's? After reading the new sex column, I flipped through the rest of the issue half-expecting to see a vegan recipe for gingerbread houses. With everything else going on in the world, is this really cover material? Besides, the answer to Shelley and Carmichael's marital sexual ennui lies within that selfsame issue of the Voice, in Dan Savage's exquisitely written column: "When two people marry, they're making a solemn vow not only to be there in sickness and in health, but to be complete and total whores for each other." Ladies, stop complaining and tell your men to step it up.
Jessica Faller
via e-mail

That cover story was so boring, so offensively haute bourgeoisie and heterosexist that I am in shock. Who cares if married people no longer have sex? This topic warrants maybe one smart-assed Dan Savage column.
Ashley Hammarth
Carrboro, North Carolina

As a woman in my twenties, I found the cover story terrifying. It was my worst nightmare: a life where I am a grown woman who shops at Forever 21. A life where my husband is so busy shopping for printers that he doesn't notice me. A life where I can't get time alone from my hired help (being able to afford hired help might be nice). A life where my husband and I are so busy working to afford all the crap, we don't have time for each other. This seems to be the average life of people over 40 who have forgotten how to live. If you want a better sex life, stop blaming it on the kids and the marriage. Do something crazy and unexpected, and see if it doesn't make you horny.
Polly H.

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