单项选择题
| There is one part of women’s magazines
that every man reads. It is the section popularly known as the "agony columns",
where women and increasingly men, write for advice on their emotional problems.
The person who answers these letters usually has a very reassuring name which
suggests a gentle middleaged lady with a lot of wisdom and experience. At one
time, it used to be widely believed that the letters were in fact all made up by
someone on the editorial staff, and that the "Aunt Mary" who provided the
answers was a fat man with a beard, who drank like a fish, smoked like a
chimney, and was unfaithful to his wife into the bargain. Although this may be
true in some cases, the majority of advice columns are genuine, and the advisory
staff are highly-qualified people with a deep understanding of human
problems. At one time, only the answers were published, not the letters themselves. Much of the fun in reading them lay in trying to work out what on earth the problem was that led to such peculiar answers. Nowadays everything is much more explicit, and questions of the most intimate kind are fully dealt with. As the agony columns have become more professional and more frank, a lot of the fun has gone out of them. This is undoubtedly a good thing, because there is something very bad about our tendency to laugh at the misfortunes of our fellow men. |