Nixzmary never lived to reach the age where sex-as-substitute-religion had any appeal. Her mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, eschewing older standards of bourgeois morality that once confined women's sexual choices, according to the New York Post had six children with four different men. The last one, Cesar Rodriguez, beat Nixzmary to death.
What is the connection? Surely not that feminists support child abuse; focusing new attention to domestic violence remains one of the movement's achievements. But the feminist leaders of Kate Michelman's generation, still painfully peddling sexual liberation as a path to empowerment for women, have never accepted responsibility for the carnage that has been unleashed in feminism's name. A marriage culture protects children by insistently asking adults to, in fact, confine, contain and channel their sexual choices so that (among other reasons) they don't hurt their own children.
Gail Sheehy makes a good living at the top of the heap, peddling an elite's woman's dream: "It's not over at 45, 'it' being sex, romance, discovery of a new identity and a new passion in life," as her Web site puts it.
Nixzmary represents the very bottom: a child who had no say in her mother's sexual choices but (like too many American children, born and unborn), paid the ultimate price.