LittleRedReadingHood

Hi, Carolyn! I read your column when it was first published and I was in high school, and loved it. I’ve continued reading and I appreciate how much the voice and depth of advice has matured (especially since it feels like it grew with me to each next life stage) but I also sometimes miss the older, more snarky tone.

I agree that the advice and tone are now more mature, but I still enjoyed the sarcasm, and moreover it was more relevant to me at the time. The old columns were witty, clever and sharp, and today they are more gentle, thorough and wise.

What I’m trying to say is, even though I can understand wishing you’d had the ability to articulate your past advice with the language of your present emotional intellect, it was right for the time—both for you and your target audience. (I.e., first the brash 20-somethings just starting out in navigating independence and non-familial relationships, and now experienced adults with history and many complex relationships.)

It is easy to say that the rape reports are overblown, and they may well be (Western media loves sensationalizing negative aspects of “exotic” countries) but it is definitely worse than the US. You have to be careful as a woman in the US but when I was in India some years back I was not allowed to go anywhere by myself without a guide/bodyguard and this was on the insistence of people I was visiting who worked and lived there.