Some time ago, a voluntarily childless woman wrote in to Dear Prudence asking how to deal with busybodies demanding to know when more children would be produced, or (worse) attempting to persuade the woman that she should get rid of her own desires not to produce them. After attempting to answer the question, the new Prudence, Emily Yoffe decided to give her letter writer the same lecture. Amber rightly pointed out that this was the height of bullheaded rudeness, as apparently, did many other letter-writers. Yoffe defends herself in this piece, which Eugene Volokh liked. (Amber can be found again in the comments.) I agree with Amber, and disagree with Yoffe, here.

Yes, lots and lots of people who decide not to have children change their minds later.

Yes, it is entirely appropriate to write pieces in the mass media encouraging this group, as a class, to change their minds.

But it is not always appropriate to direct to a particular person advice that one might direct to the entire world. This is why writing a column about the epidemic of obesity in America is different than picking out an overweight gentleman on the escalator and saying "excuse me sir, but have you ever considered dieting?" The invasive question and the persuasive op-ed are different genres.

For one thing, one's unwilling target may have reasons for acting that the busybody is not aware of. More importantly, the target will almost certainly have heard this lecture dozens of times before. Yoffe commits the all-too-human error of assuming that condescension becomes more convincing thhe more often it is repeated. It does not.

One commenter defends Yoffe on the grounds that it is a tradition of advice columns to use the reader's simple question as a launching pad for one's own agenda. Well, yes. But this is more permissible when done generally rather than particularly, when addressed to public questions rather than private ones, and it in any case has its limits. If a reader asks Prudence "What can I do to comabt anti-semitism in my workplace?" She should not reply, "Consider accepting Jesus Christ as your savior."

Now, I think that this whole mistake really results from a fatal flaw to the Dear Prudence column that has existed since its inception. Neither Slate nor the column's authors have been able to figure out what the column's exact bailiwick is. It appears to range beyond questions of manners to consider the emphatically separate domain of morals. But there are also lots of attempts to be crudely tactical while sidestepping the real questions, too. And writers frequently write in with etiquette questions, which Prudie gamely tries to answer (and frequently flubs). This moving mandate means that Prudie ends up committing gaffes even worse than the ones that her readers write in to complain about, and that her judgment is even more worthless than the all-things-considered-here's-what's-right that you got from Ann Landers or Dear Abby.