I have a love-hate relationship with Salon.com; I’ve been reading it regularly since I was about 16, and I still check it at least twice a week. But Jesus, is it ever hit-and-miss. I avoid the “personal” pieces (“I’m worried I’m not raising my kid right! The little bastard got kicked out of nursery school for biting everyone! Oh, maybe I shouldn’t let him watch TV. I’m a bad parent. No, wait, I’m a great parent. But part of being a great parent is accepting your imperfection…”) like the plague, and I have an allergic reaction to what I call the Salon tone. it's mildly tart, a tad solicitous, a bit flaky (in a meant-to-be-endearing way) and oh so very pleased with itself.

That said, their advice columnist, Cary Tennis, wrote a beautiful response to a workplace thug who wrote in complaining about a fellow employee (a woman, of course) who wore a shirt saying “Kitty Not Happy” to work. “Personally, if I were her husband and she went out of the house wearing this, or even wore it at home, come to think of it, I would want to give her a good slapping. Am I a bad person?”

Tennis’s eloquent and scathing response to this sexist-Gestapo horror jolted me into a terrible realization: Though we live in a democracy, we spend the majority of our lives living under authoritarianism. When you go to work, you invariably end up working for a boss. Even a nice boss is still a boss; the workplace is not a democracy. Small wonder that most of us, frustrated and humiliated in a thousand small ways at work, have no strength left to take part in the life of the republic.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/06/14/kitty_not_happy/