You're so...civil!

You wrote: "Essentially, I agree with you that there are too many factors involved to account for all the what-ifs. I think that's a pretty good reason not to dictate to women what should and shouldn't make them uncomfortable."

Now, here's the fulcrum of you tipping one way and me tipping the other. I think we should be made uncomfortable. As children, we believed that there were monsters beneath our beds. We were wrong, of course, for it was much worse than that: there were (and are) monsters inside of us. Our monstrously wrong assumptions about ourselves and others chase us into various social and psychological dead-ends, where the beasties inside of us consume us.

Of course, Pogo said this a long time ago and he said it without all my superfluous syllables: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

If dignity is as ephemeral as a frock, it's easily torn and easily doffed. The key is to retain dignity even if we're made naked against our will.

What's more dignified: a Nazi guard at Auschwitz with his polished medals or a half-naked, half-dead Auschwitz survivor?

"...I don't quite have your disdain for feelings as proper indicators of our choices. I tend to respect mine..."

Proper indicators of choices? Feelings ain't facts. Whereas they often properly misrepresent choices, they aren't reliable indicators of choice, as they're often curdled by mismemories. Don't respect your feelings. Plumb them. Distrust them. Slap them silly. Many responses are appropriate, but trust isn't one of them.

Have you ever had a gut response about someone? You liked them or didn't from the moment they entered a room? And did you believe that your feelings were a reliable assayer of that someone? Well, let me do some plumbing for you, sans crack. When someone walks into a room and you have a good feelin' 'bout 'em, that feeling is usually linked to something as silly as a septum similar to your Uncle Harry's, who once took you to the circus. So, on an unconscious level, you link the stranger's septum and Uncle Harry's septum and you think that the stranger might be taking you to the circus too...and somewhere else cool, except all that registers is, "I like this guy. I just have a good feeling about him."

So, it isn't disdain, but distrust. And if only there were something that served as a proper indicator of choice that were as compact and convenient as a feeling.

Lots of cyber-spittle in this thread.

Ms. Reiter, thanks for the essay. I don't know many or maybe even any women who feel domestically superior to men...and I'm glad for my friends who appreciate their partners. I suspect that women who are smug about their dishwashing are the same sorts who gleefully cleave to Baby Shower traditions and forward every email warning of the perils of breaking the precious chain.

Yep, we'll have to disagree, for I think life is too short to leave feelings unexamined. What do those who don't plumb do? Do they read books, plumbing the feelings of make-believe people? Or watch movies, doing the same? Do they repeat their narrative as a substitute for developing a new narrative?

I do know the Myers Briggs and don't find it useful. I'm not comforted by what I am. I want to become. I've known too many people whose narratives are pat and in undue response, pat themselves on the back.

And I think we should be many things: an introvert one day and an extrovert the next. Feeling and then thinking. Advancing like a Hunny horde and then lanquishing in the gilded past like the Pope. And so on. Knowing oneself only seems useful to me as an "I began here." marker.

Memoir is tricky. One can see how tricky it is by a couple recent memoirs where the author (and perhaps editor) decided that the author's agony wasn't sufficient and so they amplified it.

But what's trickiest is that so few care about a particular other, unless that other is already a celebrity. We're all navel-gazers and to snag a stranger's caring, we have to trick them into thinking that we're writing about them when we're writing about us.

So, good luck with that. It's a demanding genre!

Even your moniker bloats with bombast.

I imagine the question that elicited your moniker: "You, there, you with the OCDly rage, you must be more than a man. You must be the Greek God of Bombast, yes?"

MerelyMortalMale: "Nah, I'm merely a mortal male. I just bluster and err on the scale of a Greek God."

Why don't all you men who loathe women move over to the yonder side of the pasture, burrow into the Earth, and cuddle up like groundhogs? Soon, of course, you'll turn on each other.

Oh, the manamity, as your carping consumes you.

If you had uteruses and if it were a hundred years ago, docs would go rooting out your uteruses to cure your hysteria.

How ironic that a man-friendly essay was the starting point for the women-hating in this thread.

As far as MerelyMortalMale's especially ugly homo-hating, can someone read the gender-loathing in this thread and remind me again why straight folks are the more-equal-than-others sexuality?

As regards dusting, dusting, dusting a house, the dust will still be settling long, long, long after we're all dust. Life is for living. We'll all have forever to disintegrate into dust. I'll worry about dust then.

I like what Thelma Ritter wrote!

Then go to Pandagon and fight that fight there (and off the record, I'd like to see Pandagon deleted from the blogroll).

@Anonymouse

Huh? Couldn't you construct a clever rebuttal? Was your fallback position to hint at your unconstructed cleverness? To wit, where's your wit?