OK, just one more quote from Gissing’s The Odd Women and I promise to stop bugging you with this:

Women had individual characters; that discovery, though not a very profound one, impressed him with the force of something arrived at by independent observation. Monica often puzzled him gravely; he could not find the key to her satisfactions and discontents. To regard her simply as a human being was beyond the reach of his intelligence.

Isn’t this brilliant? I know quite a few men and women who believe the patriarchal myth of the profound differences between the sexes and who drive themselves to distraction trying to figure out what these mysterious creatures want. The idea that men and women are all simply different individuals is completely alien to them. They ruin their lives, live in misery, go from one unhappy relationship to another, obsessed with the hope of finding some guiding principle, some great law that governs the behavior of all men or all women.

I didn’t know much about Tammy Baldwin before The Washington Times informed me of how amazing she is:

She is a radical feminist who champions gay marriage, abortion on demand, government-funded contraception and war on religious freedom. She is the Sandra Fluke of Wisconsin politics — a postmodern socialist who wants government to underwrite birth control pills and homosexual unions. Ms. Baldwin is the antithesis of the working-class liberalism embodied by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Ms. Baldwin has made no secret of her lesbian lifestyle. She is a vocal supporter of gay pride and the LGBT community. She told the liberal Huffington Post that her Senate candidacy is historic. Ms. Baldwin stressed that “breaking through these glass ceilings has a ripple effect.” In other words, her election would — and should — encourage other avowed gays and lesbians to enter high office. She sees herself as the tip of the spear for the LGBT community — a relentless advocate for homosexual issues. She attacks traditional marriage. She led the fight to repeal the ban on gays openly serving in the military. She consistently assaults our Judeo-Christian heritage.

This sounds like a phenomenal candidate. I understand that in the warped mind of the article’s author all of these wonderful things somehow make Bladwin a bad candidate but The Washington Times managed to convince me that Baldwin is sensationally great and should be elected. If even her worst enemies can’t say anything negative about her, then she must be really good.

Let’s help Tammy get elected!

P.S. I’m still giggling over “postmodern socialist”, “homosexual issues” and “avowed gays and lesbians.” I think I need to subscribe to this paper because it’s too good to pass up.

We always mold our partners to make them conform to the definition of what a partner is that we carry with us since childhood. It isn’t something people do consciously, of course. Without having the slightest clue that we are doing it, we create a relationship pattern where our partner has no choice but to slip into the role we have created for him or her.

Here is a funny illustration of what I mean. My father has very curly hair. When he was younger, he had a mass of pitch-black tightly wound small curls on his head. When he was deep in thought, reading, or writing, he would slip a finger into one of these ringlets and start twirling it.

This habit drove my mother crazy.

“Misha, stop twirling your hair already!” She would sigh. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

I never told this story to N because it didn’t have an interesting punchline. And then I noticed that after living with me for years N started twirling his own hair when he was deep in thought. And he did it on the same side of his head as my father.

N’s hair is not curly which makes it pretty hard to twirl. So he takes a straight strand of hair and worries it to the point where it becomes matted and impossible to untangle.

N has no idea why he started doing it and what compels him to continue. He doesn’t know that he is recreating my childhood memory of my father for me.

Paul Ryan decided not to trail behind Obama and Romney in making extremely weird and offensive remarks about women:

Now it’s a war on women tomorrow it’s going to be a war on left-handed Irishmen or something like that.

I spend so much time with highly educated feminist men, academics, scholars, intellectuals, etc. that I had no idea things were so bad in terms of gender issues among other groups of population. These remarks don’t come from a vacuum. There is a whole culture behind them. And that’s kind of scary.