A realist?

I think you're an optimist.

I also think that your assumption will go unproven, making it fairly safe to assert in public. However, there are limited male-free domains. Have you ever hanged in lesbian separatist space? Or had tete a tetes with lesbians? There's noteworthy social violence, emotional violence, and also physical violence in those spaces and in those relationships.*

My point is that, an asshole becomes a bigger asshole on a bigger stool. Give a woman who poops nastiness a bigger throne and it's still bombs away.

LAMDA reports: "The rates of domestic violence in same-gender relationships is roughly the same as domestic violence against heterosexual women (25%)."

P.S. - I once read that it isn't a male proclivity for violence that accounts for wars, but rather a male tendency to specialize and stratify, thus making armies possible, as well as cities, dams, and bridges.

P.P.S. - You want a woman of power who bathed in blood? There's the Countess Bathory who bathed in the blood of more than 600, young, female virgins. She only got caught when she was careless enough to toss four, drained corpses over her castle wall.

people complaining about flying remind me of the fat fellow who I yesterday overheard complaining about a local principal's salary. Of course, obesity costs every American household $4,000 per year, whereas that principal's salary might cost me a tenth of a penny per year. And the Iraq tragedy costs us a billion in borrowed dollars per day. I don't know what cigarette smoking costs us, but I'm sure it's in the hundreds of billions. Even driving while cell phoning drives up our collective insurance rates by billions. But hey, hey, hey, let's complain about spending a couple hundred or thousand more each year on airline tickets.

If we lost weight, hanged up and drove, snuffed our imperialism, and stopped sucking smoke, we'd have collective trillions to apply to flying.

All those years of education and "Quit whining" is the most cogent lede you can construct?

Real nice.

Annie Lennox still takes my breath away.

I'm glad that the great Bowie has been mentioned. I see teenage boys wearing necklaces, earrings, and bracelets and frosting their hair and I wonder to what degree their girliness is due to people like Bowie, Boy George, and A. Lennox.

"Can we please retire the idea that men don't also have their selfhood constantly called into question, and that being a woman necessarily comes with greater defensiveness and scathing self-scrutiny?"

The U.S. is horribly homophobic, but in ways, it was less so 60 years ago. I once saw a WWII ear photo of U.S. soldiers and their affection for each other was physical. They didn't just lean against each other: they leaned into each other. And they were half-naked. Now, of course, they were engaged in the craft of killing other men, which made their manhood unchallenged, but it was still a degree of physical familiarity that would be deemed homosexual today. I think the flimsiness of manhood for many American males is partly due to how cushy many lives have become. They substitute puff muscles, acquired in gyms and bottles, for real strength: the sort of strength that builds bridges and lays track across mountains. They confuse the power of a gun with their power and, on a larger scale, the power of our military's weapons, with their power. How many men have borne the trials of laying railroad track or plowing a field behind a horse? In the absence of real trials, men are uncertain and define manhood by what they're not (NOT GAY!) rather than by what they are (tough, enduring, tenacious). Manhood for too many is a recliner and a beer and watching other men collide.

However, the need for man familiarity remains and plays out in cutsey phrases and conceits like "man crush."

And for the fellow who "confidentially" nipped Svutlana, your assignment is to look up the word, confidential. Dude, you posted on the Internet.

How in the Hell do you know what MEN (plural) feel, being that you're, well, just ONE (singular)?

Extrapolating: good

Overextrapolating: very, very bad

My girlfriends and I find it HOT when a guy cuddles with other guys. They don't assume he's gay. They assume he's comfy in his skin and what's sexier than that?

Nothin', honey.

Remember Robert Bly and his men's movement, with their sweat lodges and talking sticks? Well, what those guys skipped is slaying the lion. Goring the mammoth. Getting all jiggy with the Sun Dance. The lions are caged and the mammoths are extinct, but teenage boys are 15 times likelier to die an accidental death than teenage girls, thus some young men are improvising by swimming across rivers while drunk at night and surfing on the hoods of cars.

"It's rare to find a woman who really understands the complexity of men."

Do share and end the ignorance!

When I happen upon a pop star's production, I typically ignore that person and watch the talent, the people dancing behind, and wish the pop tart would just...leave.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich are different than us. They are. And dancers are too.