These results do make sense, once some faulty assumptions are reality-tested and reversed, and some context from evolutionary ecology is provided.

Across natural animal populations, differentiation in gender-based traits increases as stress increases and fitness decreases. Poor fit (low survival rates and the experience of stressors and lack of safety) signal a need for genetic change (for a better fit) and increased output of juveniles (to meet mortality). Genetic change is mediated by systems of sexual variation and reproduction through mechanisms like sexual selection (extremes in male traits selected by females) and competition among males so that gamete diversity is reduced, driving male behaviors toward aggression. Vulnerable (stressed, unfit) populations also are pushed toward rigid, coordinated, defensive, group behaviors that require differentiation of authoritarian (historically males) and conforming, complying traits as well as differentiation of fighting versus offspring-producing/nurturing castes, which are necessarily gender-based to some extent. Gender differences tend to become more exaggerated in stressed, vulnerable populations that are poorly fit to their environments.

The barrier in interpreting these results is our endearing need, against all evidence, to construct modern, Western, “prosperous” societies as somehow more healthy, stress-free, or fit to their environments than more “primitive”, poor, or agrarian cultures, valiantly attended by euphemisms like “egalitarian”, a construct that means . . . . . . . . well, that means that males and females equally can enter the dog-eat-dog, soul-killing, stress-and-disease-inducing race to status, power, and a mansion on the hill. We just tend to forget to look at the markers of celebrated “wealthy”, egalitarian societies, like ours: high infant mortality, disease rates, rates of obesity (a symptom of anxiety) of crime, aggression, and substance abuse, incarceration, and militarism needed to fight off enemies who would limit our ability to burn up global resources to heat the planet. Meanwhile, our very access to basic needs for survival (through our wage jobs) is dependent on the whims of capitalist managers with the impulse control and moral development of a – I don’t know – politician. Our well-being and survival are not in our own hands.

Pity the poor stressed souls in less wealthy agrarian cultures.

Men and women are indeed more likely to be able to integrate their shadows under less stressful living conditions. We just don’t want to go there.

Reading that, I felt a little intoxicated.

construct this person as a "woman"?

why not until just now? Why not until after Disordered Barbie gets to sit on Daddy’s lap?

With Hasselbeck’s joining in on the attacks seeming to belie the authenticity and predominance of wished-for themes - hard-hitting political or character analysis, advocacy for progressive social policy, actual journalistic anomaly - there remains a lingering flavor of: “DADDY HOW COULD YOU!! She is so NOT as smart as we are!” The regressive triangulation of as unsavory and banal a character as Cindy seems to support an element of behavioral/psychodynamic interpretation.

Or? Maybe The View suddenly and inexplicably has become radicalized and committed to dissecting cult of personality with intellectual rigor and cutting social analysis.

1. Reality test. 2. Deconstruct. 3. Rinse. 4. Repeat. Beautiful.

than this engaging writer’s suicide would be our unwillingness to look, behind the over-intellectualized writing, at presenting facts and meaning from his life. Mr. Wallace had struggled with abuse of alcohol and other drugs, a history of suicidal impulse, and with serious depression. He chose a means of taking his life with extreme lethality – he had abandoned hope.

He was uncomfortable with and avoidant of discussing either his depression or addictions, covering inner experience with intellectualism, distance, and verbal pyrotechnics, seen for example in the Charlie Rose interview. He was, in short, the perfect mark for AA, a subculture and system of ego defenses specifically generated to provide escape from the painful growth necessary to overcome depression or other emotional disorders and their underlying material. Escape by substituting slogans and platitudes for therapeutic work; and escape by encouraging continued addiction to nicotine, food, story-telling, and other distracting, compulsive behaviors used to cover the inner distress that otherwise would signal the need for work on self.

It’s a set of circumstances that keeps many addicted and in distress.