I'm usually a "quick study" when it comes to a given subject -- the "high altitude mapping" as Alan Moore called it in our "Dialogue: From Hell" a few years back. It's really what writing is made up of. Ask the hard questions, narrow the list of possibilities and work with the resulting template. As it turns out, nothing in the feminist psyche conforms to this model. All women are feminists and all feminist evidence is anecdotal. Ask them a question and they will tell you a little story. Ask them a question to clarify what you infer is the point of the story and they will tell you another story. When they do attempt to draw a conclusion or a larger inference from an anecdote they will often ask, "Does that make any sense?" And the answer, of course is (almost invariably) no, it doesn't make any sense. And since I wasn't trying to get any of them into bed, I would say so (if you're trying to get them into bed, you always say "yes, that makes perfect sense" or manufacture some sensible interpretation that has nothing to do with what they said). Telling them that they don't make sense, I found, is like telling them that not only do they not win the trip to Hawaii, they don't even get the Samsonite luggage. They become forlorn and uncommunicative. That was when I realized that it was impossible to engage them on an intellectual, reasoning, "writerly" level - that is in a purely matter-of-fact fashion. I had to act, had to portray myself as being happy, sympathetic, interested and cheerful in order to maintain a level of...
...I don't know what you would call it. It wasn't oommunicarion in any meaningful sense of the term as I understand it. It was a kind of "emotional badminton." I acted happy, sympathetic, interested and cheerful and then it was her turn to act happy, sympathetic, interested and cheerful and then it was my turn, etc. She might accidentally say something interesting where I could, with sincerity, say that I found what she had just said interesting. This temporarily escalated the level of her cheerfulness but, alas, that is all that it did: whatever was being said ranking a very distant second to maintaining and escalating the level of cheerfulness. A very, very distant second. I realized that this is where the "henhouse cacophony" originates. If "communication" within a group of women is working properly (as women see "working properly") everyone should be talking faster and faster and faster and in a higher and higher musical range - either portraying themselves or being (the two states being deemed interchangeable in the female world) cheerful, more cheerful, "cheerfulest" -- until, maximum cheerfulness having been achieved, a glass breaks or something.
That was when I realized that women are emotion-based beings. "Once a thing is seen, it can't be unseen." I gave a oouple of more tries at relationships after that (a year-and-a-half and three-and-a-half years respectively) but it was really like solving a "brain teaser" after someone has given you the answer. You know - one of those puzzles where you are supposed to "make three triangles by oonnecting the dots using only seven lines" (or whatever). It can drive you insane for a month, but if you look in the back of the book, or if someone shows you how it's solved or you figure it out on your own, there is little entertainment value to be had in endlessly drawing those same seven lines to make those same three triangles. Likewise, there is little in the way of intellectual value to be derived from revisiting - either mentally or "in person" the simple fact (once discovered), that women are emotion-based beings and that (consequently) any female-centred or female-originated political movement - more precisely, "political" "movement" - will lack sound intellectual footing. Hence, my billing of "Tangent" as "my last word on gender."
Women are emotion-based beings.