Three letters to The Economist, December 16, 2006

The dating game

SIR - I found your article on the fashion for purity in America to be, well, quaint ("In praise of chastity", November 18th). As an evangelical Christian man who, in keeping with his religious convictions, has remained chaste before marriage into his 40s, my experience with women, including Christian women, has been that they care not one jot about pairing with a spouse who is chaste. In fact, I have had a few instances where a chaste woman actually preferred a fellow to have a resume, especially if he was a little older. It does not mean that an otherwise attractive buck-a-roo is taken out of the rodeo, but being chaste does not appear to move one from the runner-up category to the leader board. Christian guys go down in flames in the proverbial dating dogfight. Until women really care about their partner being chaste and use it as a criterion to select a spouse the concept of chastity will remain drivel, fantasy and wishful thinking.

Scott
Fairfax, Virginia

Coffee circle

SIR - Your article on Ethiopia's conflict with Starbucks challenged the motivations behind the Ethiopian government's initiative to trademark its coffee brands ("Storm in a coffee cup", December 2nd). You did this with an air of great certainty, pointing out that Ethiopia ranks horribly low on indices of investment and corruption. However, the indices to which you refer are constructed largely on the basis of surveys of perceptions of investors and consultants, that is of readers of publications like The Economist. Think about it: you tell your readers the government is up to no good, and you, in turn, use that "evidence" to support your argument that the government, indeed, is up to no good. Ethiopia's government may or may not have benign intentions, but your argument would be more compelling were it less circular.

Ken Shadlen
Lecturer in development studies
London School of Economics
London

SIR - As a Starbucks barista, I was pleased to read your even-handed treatment of the Ethiopian trademarking controversy. Anyone who studies the way Starbucks buys its coffee (which is required of all employees) knows that it lives up to its goal of "contributing positively to our community and our environment". But you made one error. At Starbucks the wetness of a drink refers to its proportion of foam to steamed milk. A latte is almost entirely steamed milk with only a dollop of foam. Thus, your "grande extra-wet triple latte" is actually a triple grande no-foam latte.

Steven Crawford
Tuscon, Arizona