The talk shows* I prefer to all others are the ones about custody battles and battles over real estate. It’s weird because neither issue has ever been present in my life to any extent.

* They play in the background while I cook or play Cinderella, like today when I’m sorting beans.

As I matured, I formed an image of men as sensitive, fragile, likely to wither under the weight of their health issues and psychological problems. Men were prone to messing up in a variety of ways, and it was up to women to gather and hold long conferences on how to straighten them out.

Whenever a man screwed up really badly there was an immediate investigation aimed at discovering which woman was at fault for not managing his life in a more efficient manner.

“Men! What can you expect from them? It’s our job as women to make sure they stay alive,” I would hear.

Men who didn’t have any women to take care of them were objects of intense pity. I still can’t see lonely old men without an overpowering sense of guilt and compassion. Lonely old women never evoked the same emotions in anybody, however, because it was obvious that they could taken perfect care of themselves.

The women I saw around could do anything. They made money, managed their families, and could bully anybody in sight into submission. They didn’t look happy, though. Just the opposite, they acted like intensely miserable people. They yelled, had hysterical outbursts, beat their children for no reason, and cried a lot more than they smiled.

It took me many years to find out why the women I knew were so unhappy.